You are very happy tonight.
How do you know? Why can’t I show this conversation to anyone?
At the right time everyone will know. They aren’t ready.
You are from another planet.
:)
And I need Raye’s help.
You know what he has found?
Yes.
Do you have something to do with the noise?
Is the noise your planet?
No.
No, but . . .
But that is where I want to go.
I am going to have to locate the dog again. He didn’t look after the dog. There will be a slight delay.
The dog? I looked at the world outside the phone booth as if I would see a dog among the late-night check-ins. On the concierge’s desk, a small sign apologized for the inconvenience of her not being there.
Forgive me if there is a long period of silence.
I must search and solve problems for the dog.
I fell asleep in the comfort of the booth, one of those deep, paralyzing sleeps from childhood, and dreamed of being back in the hospital bed beside Mr. Leggett. I happily waited for Rose Epstein to call her name and tell everyone she wanted to go home. I wanted Mr. Leggett to tell one of his stupid jokes even though I had always agreed with my father about jokes being the shallowest form of human conversation.
In chapter 9 of The Universe Is a Pair of Pants, “Mediocre Men,” Van Raye ranked them:
3) Talking about sports.
2) Talking about television shows.
1) Telling jokes—“Did you hear the one about . . . ?”
“It is slightly interesting to wonder where these jokes come from,” he wrote. “The ‘farmer’s daughters’ jokes, ‘a guy walks into a bar’ jokes? Nobody knows who creates dirty jokes, nor why such categories evolve and remain. How do the jokes survive in the world? How do they become popular enough to be repeated? Why do these appeal to people, appeal to them enough that they are memorized and stored? They spread like the most proficient virus. Why?”
In the chapter, he tells of an experiment. He made up a joke, told it to a friend when they were on a hiking trip on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula (picture a woman in a tent). “I told my English-speaking friend the joke on top of a volcano,” he wrote. “It was funny, if I say so myself. I told no one else the joke, and I will not write it here. This is about what spreads among human beings by shear desire to have this superficial contact with other human beings. I hope to one day hear my joke repeated to me somewhere far away from Kronotsky.”
I woke in the phone booth the next morning, sat blinking my eyes to a new, dull-gray day dawning through the hotel, and I was surprised to see Elizabeth get out of the elevator at that moment, fully dressed in a navy business suit. I started to fold the door open but Elizabeth’s speed of walking made me stop to see what the hell was going on. She was looking at someone. He was in the direction of the bank of courtesy phones on the opposite wall, and as soon as I saw the rounded Bob Cratchit posture I knew it was Charles.
CHAPTER 30
Charles wore a big blue arctic parka and a knit cap. He still had on sunglasses like he was a movie star, and the heavy coat couldn’t hide that stooping posture. They went toward each other like a bad movie, Van Raye with his arms open, Elizabeth moving too fast, not even caring if anyone saw her. She hit him with an embrace that knocked him slightly off balance, then took his cheeks between her hands and stretched her neck forward to kiss him on the lips.
He appeared mildly shocked.
I rose awkwardly out of the booth, stood with the help of my cane and the doorframe.
I walked to them and said, “Elizabeth?”
She let go of him and kept his elbow in her grip and simply said, “Charles is here!”
“Look who’s here!” he said, eyes behind the glasses. “Me!”
“Charles,” I said. He came and hugged me, pinning my arms so that I could only touch his elbows. “It’s really you,” I said. “Thank God. Charles, let me go. You’re squeezing me.”
He did and said, “We’re all here!” He took in the sight of Elizabeth, down to her gold shoes. “I’ve never had a greeting like that! Darling, look at you, you look fantastic! I look horrible. It really took too long to get here. It wasn’t supposed to be this long. And the storm.” His parka squeaked as he moved. He had on black pants and boots with zippers.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re here.”
The waterfall ran in the fake rainforest. The Air of Liability was clear. Guests pulled their luggage by us. Everything was quite normal except the girlish look of delight on Elizabeth’s face.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Well, we have plenty of time.” He clapped his hands. “You look fine,” he said to me. “I love the getup,” he pointed to my red tracksuit. “Very urban.” He took Elizabeth’s arm, me with the other, moving us along as if we were guests in his hotel.
“My God. This is just like you to call when you are already here,” Elizabeth said. “I wasn’t even dressed. I could have used some warning.”
“We had to beat the storm.”
“Have you had breakfast?” she said. “Do you want a room? Of course you want a room. There’s an extra room, Sandeep’s old room. I could see what else is available. I’ll book you something.”
“Elizabeth, slow down,” he said. “I’ve got some things.” He pointed toward a gold luggage cart where a homeless woman sat on a pile of cheap bags that included two garbage bags and a drawstring laundry bag. The woman’s hair had recently been sheared off. She wore sandals, her legs spread so that hairy shins were revealed.
He herded us to the cart and said, “This is Ruth Christmas.”
The woman didn’t attempt to get off the cart. She had an unlit cigarette in her fingers and she had the expression of careful, objective observing.
“This is Elizabeth Sanghavi, and this is Sandeep.”
She only nodded and reached up and hooked her hand around the top bar of the cart and let it hang there as she took an imaginary drag of the unlit cigarette in the other. She was clearly deranged. My thought was, Where had he picked her up?
“This is . . . ” Elizabeth said, “this is your luggage? I mean, this is it?” Elizabeth was staring at the woman, but then tried to occupy her eyes with scanning the bags. “I thought you were bringing your horn.”
“My horn?” he said.
“I don’t see your horn.” Her voice had changed.
“Elizabeth, I haven’t played my horn in years. Ruth did most of the driving. I’m starving.”
“You don’t have your horn?” Elizabeth said again, and I wanted her to stop repeating herself. She’d told me a thousand times that only dullards repeated things in order to give the dullard time to think about what was going on.
“I haven’t played a horn in years. You know that.” He smiled.
“You mentioned starting back,” she said.
The bellhops in their maroon uniforms wore ushankas that made them look like ice fishermen in band uniforms.
“Ruth and I were wondering,” Van Raye said, “if we might see the hotel’s roof.”
“The roof?” I said, being the dullard now.
“We’re searching for a certain type of dish antenna—”
My phone chimed and Charles looked at it as though it were a turd.
A message from Ursula said:
Dubourg is here
“What?” I mumbled.
Van Raye maneuvered Elizabeth and me by the arm again as if to talk to us in private.
Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder. “She’s with you?”
“Now, sweetheart, before assumptions are made . . .” He turned slightly back at the other woman—“Ruth is . . . ”—who still sat on the bags on the cart and out of earshot. She put the cigarette in her mouth and drug on it as if it were lit; she even squinted through nonexistent smoke.
<
br /> I saw Elizabeth’s focus in the distance, and her eyes became sleepy the way she did when she was playing a particular difficult piece of music. She refocused on Charles talking about driving, and she slowly lifted her hand and tucked her fingers, and I saw the meaty paler part of her palm rise, and I had a flash memory to the executive self-defense course we’d taken in Trenton, New Jersey, years ago, and that meaty part of her hand traveled on a path toward Van Raye. He could only flinch before it struck him on his cheek, half slap and half fist.
He stepped backward, mouth open. “My God!” He still had those horrible sunglasses on.
Travelers stopped walking, stopped talking on their phones to see this spectacle.
The woman sitting on the luggage began to laugh.
Elizabeth covered her mouth. “Dear God, are you okay?”
“Violence?” he said. “Seriously?”
“He’s okay,” I said. “You’re okay, aren’t you?”
“NO!” He leaned away from me.
Elizabeth recovered and dropped her hands. “Go find another hotel! Get out!”
“Elizabeth, darling . . . ”
“Elizabeth,” I said, “wait a minute, okay?”
I saw the front desk staff dispersing, one woman quickly coming out of the door.
Van Raye said to Elizabeth, “Please don’t. I have nothing.” He finally took his glasses off and folded them and put them in his parka’s pocket, withdrawing a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses. “I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said. “I don’t have nothing exactly. I do have one thing. Sandeep knows. I’ve had a bit of success. For what I was searching for.”
Someone had summoned potbellied Mr. Blaney, and Albert from security followed.
“What has happened here?” Mr. Blaney said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Was someone struck?” Albert in his brown nylon jacket and tie wanted to know, his aftershave arriving with him.
“I’m handling everything,” Elizabeth said. “This is a family matter, and I apologize.”
“I’ll go get an incident report,” Albert said.
“I don’t need an incident report,” Elizabeth said. “Please leave us.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Blaney said and motioned for Albert to disperse, and Blaney left without a glance back.
Van Raye unzipped the jacket and said, “Seriously, Elizabeth? It takes a lot to admit this to you, but I am broke.”
“Broke you should be familiar with,” she said. “And we are always here to bail you out, aren’t we?”
“It’s not like that. That’s not true.” In a lower voice, he said, “You know what I’ve found.”
“Yes,” she said. “That has nothing to do with us.”
He let out a breath. “It has everything to do with everyone. Look, I need a place to stay. Ruth is here to help me work. She’s the only person who can help. She’s a genius.”
When we turned to see Ruth Christmas sitting on the luggage, she shrugged.
I reached out to Elizabeth, but she turned and stormed toward the elevator.
I hobbled on my cane to catch up to her. She pushed the button and waited for the elevator. I turned to Van Raye and held up a finger for him to stay away.
Elizabeth tried to control her breathing as she watched the numbers above the elevator. “The man will never change. I don’t want him here.”
“Yes, you do. Who was that back there that I just saw?”
“You mean the genius?”
“No, I mean you.”
“Me?” she said.
“Yes. You were someone else, asking about his horn. And then you hit him.”
She closed her eyes and made a visible shudder. “Sandeep, look at me, I’m shaking. Yes, I struck someone.”
I leaned on my cane. “We can let him stay.”
“He’s using us.”
“What does that hurt? He’s going to do this anyway. We can let him work here. Just don’t get too close.”
Elizabeth considered the chandelier in the ceiling, then casually glanced at the woman across the lobby dressed in a green flight suit and with no hair.
“A genius?” Elizabeth said sarcastically.
I quickly typed Ursula a message that I was coming to the room.
Elizabeth said, “‘Genius’ is a term tossed around too much, don’t you think? You’re a genius, Sandeep.”
I stopped typing and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“See, you can label anyone,” she said.
She took in a deep breath.
“Holy shit,” I said, “for a second there, you scared me.” Elizabeth and I watched the other woman put her feet up on the bags.
“His discovery won’t make this elevator any faster, will it?” she said.
“Dubourg and Ursula are here.”
She turned to me. “We’re supposed to be getting back on task here. I’m ready to put this hotel behind us.” She looked back at the two geniuses. “Book only one room for the geniuses. What do I care? Put them away together. We’ll pay for everything, of course.”
CHAPTER 31
I went to my room to collect my cousins. We hugged and then divvied up my ski gear because I told them Van Raye was going to the roof to check out some antenna. Ursula cursed me for leaving her alone in the room and ended up putting on Dubourg’s wool pea coat, and Dubourg put on my hooded ski jacket. We took the service elevator to the attic storage room, and Dubourg and Ursula followed me through aisles of fold-up bed frames from some forgotten era, me following the path of ceiling lights Elizabeth had flipped on only minutes before, purplish and buzzing as they warmed inside wire cages. A set of steel stairs on the far wall went up to a landing and a single metal door. Halfway up, I had to catch my breath and my phone dinged:
Raye is with you.
I turned the phone to them. “Can you see this?” I said.
“No,” Dubourg said, patiently waiting behind me for my legs to rest.
Wind shook the door at the top of the landing and drew our attention, and I kept trudging upward. Ursula reached the door first and pushed its handle and the wind threw it open. Dubourg and I covered our eyes, blinking into the snow. This was the top of the hotel, literally in the sky, swirling with cold that immediately bit at my ears.
Elizabeth stood calmly in the wind shadow of a giant metal utility box, only the triangle of her wool overcoat lifting, her cheap sunglasses on. She pulled her scarf down to say something I couldn’t hear, and pointed. The flagpole’s halyard dinged a rhythm. Ducts leaked clouds of steam that tumbleweeded and thinned and disappeared before it got to an old satellite dish, and there was Van Raye marching toward us with arms raised, a giant smile on his face. “There is more here!” he shouted. “Look at the people!” The ends of his white hair were damp, snow collected on his cap.
Something heavy dropped and Dubourg stepped past me to intercept Charles. Dubourg’s hand went toward Van Raye in slow motion and struck him on the right side of his face. My first reaction to Charles being punched for a second time that day, I’m sorry to say, was to laugh. Maybe it was seeing the physics of Van Raye’s twisting body again and the expression on his face change from the bullshit of his greeting to total candor and the shock of a Munch scream, and then there was the miraculous catch he made on his way to the ground of his eyeglasses in midflight.
He rolled to his elbows and shut his mouth and blinked up at us. There was the slow blossom of a laceration above his eye.
I said to Dubourg, “What was that for?”
Dubourg, hopping around opening and shutting his bare hand to stay the pain, yelled at me, “Why did I do that?”
Van Raye’s gloved hand, the one not holding his glasses, was on the ground beside my foot, and because it was an easy thing to do, I adjusted my weight and lifted my right foot and put it on his hand. The glove was thick, but I pressed through the cushion until I felt his hand inside. I tried to remember if Van Raye had wronged Dubourg lately or if this was
just some kind of reaction. Their last meeting was a few years ago, back when Dubourg was in seminary, and the three of us met in Southern California on a day that couldn’t have been more different from this. That meal had been completely amicable, though afterward Dubourg had mentioned that the man talked down to him.
“My God,” Van Raye said now. “More violence? What was that for?”
Dubourg spun like a dizzy kid and tucked his hand between his leg. “Oh fuck, oh fuck. That was pent-up anger. Oh fuck, I’m sorry. I really have hated you all these years. But I’m sorry!” Dubourg’s breathing produced condensation, but the curses were cloudless Oh fucks, and he began mumbling in the blizzard, “Tadyatha diri tishta taskara . . . ” his eyes closed, hands on his knees.
“For what?” Van Raye snapped. “Jesus, I’ve never done anything to you.”
Then there was laughter behind us and Dubourg’s chanting stopped. Through the falling snow, standing and in front of a satellite dish antenna, the “genius” had her jacket hood over her head and was laughing, trying to clap but she had a tool in her hand. A utility box on the pole of the satellite dish flapped.
When the genius saw Ursula and Dubourg staring at her she put a hand on top of her head to keep the hood on. Her face was in the shadow, and we could see only her breath and that unlit cigarette. In her other hand she worked a pair of pliers as if deciding whose teeth to pull first. She stilled the control panel’s flapping door without taking eyes off us. She still wore flip-flops. Her toes must have been frostbitten. Obviously she was crazy.
Van Raye shouted up at me from the ground. “Sandeep! You’re on my hand!” Blood trickled from the bridge of his right eye.
“Oh, sorry!” I shouted. “I don’t have normal sensation in my feet!” A gust rocked me off balance.
He raised himself to his knees. Dubourg and I grabbed him under his arms and hauled him to his feet.
Cosmic Hotel Page 20